


View From the Top

by indevan



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Introspection, M/M, like sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-26 21:34:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18725422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indevan/pseuds/indevan
Summary: Crow knew, fundamentally, that he was in love with Jack.  But being in love with Jack didn’t necessarily entail liking him, right?





	View From the Top

**Author's Note:**

> my internet at home has been spotty and in addition, i've felt kind of iffy on my writing lately so i haven't gotten anything done. instead, i felt nostalgia for one of my older fandoms and edited this fic i wrote nearly eight years ago to post here while i'm surfing the wave! it takes place after the final timeskip, btw

Crow was somewhere in the gray area between asleep and awake despite the fact that it was approaching two in the morning.  He lay next to Jack as he did nearly every night but he felt unsure. Sometimes he was certain that he hated him. Other times, he couldn’t get enough of him.  And he really didn’t understand it. He never did relationships—it wasn’t his thing. But Jack was different. Jack was… _ Jack _

There was an undeniable  _ Jackness  _ about him that annoyed him intensely since he could never truly get him off his mind.  Back when they would just fuck for fun, he could  _ smell  _ him on his skin and in his hair the next day, even after he showered.  The  _ essence  _ of him.

Even now, he was curled around him in bed and he still couldn’t make up his fucking mind.  Feeling antsy, Crow threw off the covers and got out of bed. He reached for the nightstand and pulled an old, crumpled pack of cigarettes from the drawer.  He kept them there for emergencies and he considered this a pretty big fucking emergency.

He didn’t bother going outside and instead just leaned against the window in the bedroom.  Another thing Crow wasn’t used to: living this high up. Jack’s apartment was in Tops, and Crow felt…exposed when he spent the night.  Staring down at the twinkling lights of the city, thinking about how he used to stare at them from across the water and wonder what life was like in those high-rises.  Jack was on his way to reclaiming his title of King as if it even meant anything anymore and that apparently entailed this swanky-ass manor.

Crow hated it.  It was too big and too minimal and too sleek.  He liked things cluttered and small and… _ rustic. _  It was what he was used to.  It was how he thrived.

The glass was cool against his bare shoulder as he leaned his weight against it to light his cigarette.  While he inhaled, letting the cigarette dangle from his lips, he adjusted the t-shirt he had slept in to get the sleeve against the glass to avoid the slight chill.

He took the cigarette from his lips and exhaled.  Crow didn’t care if he got ash all over Jack’s plush, white carpet.  Hell, maybe it’d give it some character. And maybe part of him wanted to mess with Jack a little.  Piss him off. Jack was pretty hot when he was angry. Or maybe he wanted to piss him off so badly he tossed him out and said to go the fuck back to his own place and stop sullying his goddamn fancy-pants apartment.

Crow groaned and took another drag on his cigarette.  He felt like a conflicted teenager with his feelings about Jack and it was starting to get old—even in his own head.

Angrily, he turned and ground his cigarette out in the ashtray he had put on the nightstand when he first started spending nights there.  He thought back to perhaps the only other time in his life where he could say he was  _ in love _ .  Crow had been with a lot of people in his lifetime but he reserved that degree of affection for certain people.

Pearson.

Over the years, Crow had tried to convince himself with varying degrees of success that what he felt for Pearson was just lust or puppy love.  He had been fifteen. He had been sleeping on the streets (in the loosest sense of the word; Crow had barely gotten any sleep since he was keeping watch for his kids) and had gone back to turning.  Pearson was some sort of white knight on a yellow and black steed that came and gave him some sort of purpose.

At night, he’d dream of kissing him as well as doing other, more x-rated things to him.  He had let his heart be open only for it to be trampled upon with ridiculous reasons like “I’m in a committed relationship” and, “You’re half my age.”

Thinking back, the entire ordeal probably fucked him up more than he realized.  Crow knew he probably needed to talk about what actually happened in his life rather than covering it up with jokes and casual sex but that was something he wasn’t exactly prepared to do yet.

Instead, he just set his cigarette down in the tray and lay back down in bed.  Crow contemplated waking Jack up but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say to him or if he wanted to say anything to him at all.

Crow knew, fundamentally, that he was in love with Jack.  But being in love with Jack didn’t necessarily entail  _ liking _ him, right?  He reached for his cigarette again, regretting having stubbed it out.  His head felt fuzzy and clogged, almost as though he was sick.

He took a deep breath and turned to look at Jack sleeping next to him.  He was looking pretty fucking lush and for some reason, that pissed him off.  Jack looked like the sort of hero in a romantic movie. His chest was bare and the sheets were tangled around his waist and legs.  He was on his side, breathing regularly and not snoring even though Crow knew that when he was drunk or ate too much, Jack snored like a lumberjack just as Jack knew that Crow sometimes mumbled or talked in his sleep.  The moonlight came in through the window and highlighted his skin, making it look marbled like those statues he saw in the colorful encyclopedias Martha had.

Suddenly, Crow was seized with anger towards him.  Why did Jack get to sleep so peacefully while Crow was smoking against the window and fretting over the difference between love and like?  He reached out and shook Jack awake despite knowing that it was fruitless. Jack slept so deeply that it would take an atomic explosion to wake him up—and even then he’d only momentarily stir.  Crow knew he had to take sneakier tactics to make him commiserate with him.

He leaned down over him and whispered hotly into his ear, “I ate all your ramen.”

The result was predictable and instantaneous.  Jack sprang up, eyes flashing.

“HOW DARE YOU?!” he roared, breathing so heavily through his nose that Crow expected to see each exhale accompanied by little puffs of smoke.

Crow toppled backwards, probably wrinkling Jack’s immaculate six hundred thread count sheets under his ass as he landed, and rolled his eyes.

“Christ, I didn’t,” he muttered.  He raised a hand to his ear and rubbed the sore orifice.  Sometimes he forgot just how loud Jack could be. “I was just trying to wake you up.”

At that, Jack seemed to calm down significantly and he smoothed his hair down from its sleep-induced messiness.

“Oh.  Right.”

Jack rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked at the clock.  Of course, the next sound that came out of his mouth was that superior huff of his.

“It’s two in the morning,” he growled. “Why did you wake me up?”

Crow twisted his mouth to the side.  He wasn’t sure how to word “I am pissed off at how much I love you” or “Be miserable with me.”

“Why are we together?” he asked instead.

Jack stared at him in the darkness.  He always had this sort of different look to him, Crow noticed.  Ever since they were kids, really. Jack’s eyes seemed wet and lambent.  Like a black and white movie star. More than that. Crow still remembered when he confused him by saying that Jack reminded him of Elizabeth Taylor in  _ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof _ , one of the fist films he saw in color on the shaky old television they kept in the living room that got no channels but had a machine that played clunky old, black tapes.  He meant the eyes. That shade of purple that he had never seen anywhere else.

“What do you mean?”

Crow sighed and stopped staring into his eyes to try and formulate an answer.

“We seem to either argue or have sex—or one and then the other.  Are we together? Is this how couples are supposed to act? Are we even a couple?”

“I thought we were,” Jack said simply.

“Really?  We don’t go out in public.  We don’t hold hands. Or…shit, I don’t know what I’m saying.  I just think I love you but I don’t always like you. How fucked up is that?”

Jack replied by sniffing the air and wrinkling his perfectly even, straight nose.

“Were you smoking in here?”

“JACK, DID YOU LISTEN TO A WORD I SAID?!”

The other man drew him up so he towered over Crow.

“DID YOU SMOKE IN HERE?!”

“YES, GODDAMNIT.  THAT’S NOT THE POINT!”

“IT VERY WELL IS!  IF YOU GOT ASH ON MY CARPET—”

“THIS IS WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT!”

Crow picked up a pillow and threw it angrily at Jack’s head.  Naturally, the other man caught it and lowered the offending pillow from his face.

“And what was that about?” He was no longer shouting but there was still that huffy, self-important tint to his voice that Jack just seemed to naturally have.

Crow let his head fall back and he reached for the remains of his cigarette in the ashtray.  His lighter was still resting next to it and he clicked it in hopes to spark up. Jack grabbed the lighter before he could even get a flicker and pulled it from his grasp.

_ “Not _ in my room!”

Feeling particularly vindictive as well as peeved that this conversation wasn’t going at all as planned (disregarding the fact that there had been no plan to begin with) Crow twisted his cigarette and let the tobacco fall out, falling to the bed like particularly cancerous snow.  Jack’s face, at that point, nearly went as purple as his eyes Crow had been romanticizing earlier.

“Why did you do that?!” he demanded. “These sheets are—”

Crow cut him off, speaking quickly and without thinking. “Because I love you and I have no idea what the fuck that means.  How I don’t understand how we argue like this and yet all I can think about is wanting to be with you. How much I love waking up next to you even on days when I hate seeing your superior fucking face!  And it’s a bunch of fucking contradictions and I don’t get it! I don’t get it and I hate it! And I hate you even though I love your stupid, fucking—”

It was Jack’s turn to cut him off.  He leaned forward and kissed him. It wasn’t a frenzied, passionate kiss like they usually had up against walls or in bed or wherever they decided that whatever emotion they were feeling needed to boil over into kissing.  It was almost tender—or as tender as Jack could be. He cupped Crow’s face with one hand and put the other at his hips. Gently, he broke the kiss and stared him straight in the eye.

“You do know this sort of thing—our sort of thing—doesn’t have to make sense.  The only thing that does is that we…”

Crow couldn’t help but smirk.  _ “Love each other?” _

He made sure his statement was accompanied by a revolting kissy-face that made Jack roll his eyes.  On one level, as usual, Crow was pissed. Jack was making sense and being rational and he was freaking out.  He hated it. No, shit. He loved it. Because he was right. He loved Jack; that was for sure. Maybe…they didn’t have to like each other all the time and maybe they’d never be perfect but that was alright for them.  And even if his one sentence didn’t make everything okay, it didn’t have to. Love—at least, their love—wasn’t about grandiose speeches and everything being tied up in a neat little package. It was just about…them.

“Now clean this tobacco off my bed,” Jack said, gesturing to the specks of brownish-black on his otherwise pristine white sheets.

“Sure thing, your majesty.”

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: vertigoats  
> twitter: smugsnail(priv)/smugsnailcos(public)


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